Analyze

As explained in this press release, environmental activists in Calhoun County have signed paperwork to begin clean up of local waterways:

"The Phase I cleanup requires the excavation of soils and removal of plants that are littered with plastic nurdles. The soils removed will fill 1,824 20-yard dump trucks – approximately 32,840 tons of soil and debris. A nurdle is a hard, small, spherical pellet, about the size of a baby aspirin and is produced from petrochemicals. Nurdles are used in the manufacture of plastics."

This text builds from earlier conceptions of the term “land dispossession” and “land grab”. As defined by the 2011 International Land Coalition, land grabbing specifically refers to large scale land acquisitions that are “ in violation of human rights, without prior consent of the preexisting land users, and with no consideration of social and environmental impacts”. Characterization of land grabs and their resulting harms most commonly considers the effect of physical displacement and harms within the articulated “grabbed” area (Nyantakyi-Frimpong, 2017;Ogwand, 2018;  huaserman, 2018). Li and Pan seek to expand the frame of analysis for land grabs beyond the site of grabbed land to consider the full extent of harms associated with land grabs both geographically (via pollution spillover to areas outside of “grabbed land”) and temporally (via latent “expulsion by pollution). 

 “While the villagers are not passive victims and have adopted various resistance strategies, the space for them to struggle and achieve success is confined and shaped by the existing power asymmetry in which local villagers, capital and local government are embedded.”  (Li and Pan, 2021, p 418). 

“...this framing of land dispossession is problematic in two aspects. Firstly, it obscures an invisible form of land dispossession in which people still maintain control of their land but its use value is damaged by pollution. This kind of indirect land dispossession could lead to expulsion, not due to the direct loss of control over land but by it being rendered useless by pollution.” Li and Pan, 2021, p 409). 

 This text employs a case study approach to characterize how villagers in a village in China have been displaced “in-place” as a result of new industrial activities within the area  (all specific details have been hidden within the publication, wherein the names of villager groups and the site of study itself is referenced only by coded letters). The scale of analysis primarily centers at the village level, though analysis of the case study itself extends towards the country level specifically when analysis of state actors are involved. 

Authors Hua Li and Lu Pan are scholars from China. Li is  affiliated with the College of Humanities and Law at Taiyuan University of Technology, wherein her research focuses specifically on water politics, environmental justice, and rural development and agrarian change. Pan is affiliated with the College of Humanities and Development at China Agricultural University. Her research interests include marginalized communities, rural development, and agrarian change.

The report was published by the Select Bipartisan commitee.

The actors that were behind the report was the government. It was a governent ordered report by the second session of the 109th congress,.

The event/series of events that caused the report to be published was the investigation of the preparation for and the reposonse to Hurricane Katrina- how was it a failure.

The components of the report was medical care (how adequate/inadequate overall care was), shelter and housing( or lack there of) logistics and constracting, charitable organizations and an overall conclusion of the report that described the failure of initative.

The data for the rport was collected for the end of 2005 to the beginning of 2006.